Whistler History and Future

On a recent trip to Whistler, a friend and I were chatting about how the resort grew to it’s current state. Since neither one of us really knew, I cracked open the internetz to figure it out. Here are some of the interesting facts I found, but feel free to read a more detailed version if you like.

- The area originally gained popularity as a fishing village around in the early 1900s.
- Whistler Mountain opened for skiing in 1966. It was originally called London Mt but was renamed for a local mountain marmot that whistles.
- Blackcomb Mountain opened separate from Whistler in 1980 and the two had quite a rivalry to provide the best terrain and most vertical feet.
- Whistler Mountain Ski Corp (owners of Whistler) merged with Intrawest (owners of Blackcomb) in 1997.

Other random facts I discovered while reading through their master plan:

- 45% of visitors to Whistler ride snowboards. That has been fairly steady since 2002. The Rocky Mountains have the lowest percentage of snowboarders (25%) in North America.
- Whistler receives about 25% more visitors than Blackcomb.
- A really busy day is about 25,000-27,000 visitors.
- There are roughly 58,705 “bed units” in the Whistler area.

This figure shows future plans for Blackcomb. Red lines are in the next phase of lifts and aqua lines are the phase after that. Most existing to me on Blackcomb are the glacier lift and Ruby Bowl.

And here is a similar figure for Whistler. Phase order is red, purple, yellow. There is quite a bit of lift replacement planned there as well as three new lifts from the based of Symphony. But the really big area is from the West Bowl down to Cheakamus Base (further down from Creekside.) That will open up a ton of new terrain.

Don’t get too excited though. Plans like this can look 20-30 years into the future and might never come to fruition for a lot of reasons. It’s fun to dream though!